Alaric wrote:Would there have been some form of de minimis relief between 1965 and 1977?
1977 was around the time when there was a mass public sale of the government's excess holding of BP shares, something of a prototype for later privatisation. If you held shares purchased for £ 100 and sold for £ 110, I imagine neither the holder nor the Inland Revenue would want the palaver of trying to declare, find and collect £ 3 in taxation.
1977 was a couple of years earlier than that privatisation, which according to Wikipedia was done "in stages between 1979 and 1987". And although it would be tempting to think that the mention in "In 1977, there was a general exemption for individuals from paying any tax if gains were less than £1,000 in any given tax year, which runs from 6 April to 5 April in the United Kingdom. Now known as the Annual Exempt Allowance, this has generally risen steadily ever since and the rate for trusts has always been half of the threshold for individuals, so it was £500 in 1977. The rate for individuals in 2020–21 is £12,300 for individuals and £6,150 for trusts." above of what is now more commonly (but less technically) called the CGT allowance was a de minimis step in preparation for the privatisation of BP and other companies, I don't think the last part can be true: we had a Labour government in 1977 under James Callaghan and I really cannot imagine it would have done anything with the aim of preparing for or supporting the policy of privatisations of the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher which replaced it in 1979!
As to whether there was any sort of de minimis relief from CGT from when it was introduced in 1965 to 1977, I find it hard to imagine that there wasn't - but I don't know of anything offhand. And the only source I can think of for that information involves a lot of poring through old legislation on https://legislation.gov.uk, so I'm probably not going to do it!
Gengulphus